We are taught to treat quantum mechanics as intrinsically strange, opaque, almost hostile to intuition. The standard story is that reality itself is bizarre, and that only extreme mathematical sophistication grants partial access to it. Yet this framing quietly ignores another possibility: that many workable intuitions, partial models, and genuinely useful ways of thinking never survive the institutional filters through which knowledge must pass. Ideas do not fail only because they are wrong; they fail because they are unpublished, unfunded, uncitable, or voiced by the wrong person in the wrong place. What reaches us as “accepted understanding” is not the full field of thought, but a narrow, heavily curated slice shaped by career incentives, disciplinary boundaries, and revenue-driven publishing systems.
The result is a peculiar inversion. We marvel at how unintuitive the world appears, while systematically suppressing the cognitive diversity that might make it more intelligible. Academia, optimised for prestige, continuity, and income streams, is structurally hostile to ideas that do not immediately reinforce its own hierarchies. People need to live, yes, but the system that enables that living is no longer aligned with collective understanding. The weirdness we attribute to nature may instead be a symptom of intellectual monoculture: not that reality resists comprehension, but that comprehension is quietly filtered out long before it can challenge the status quo.
Daedelus Kite 